Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Ummmm. Ya... He's allergic to everything.

So forgive me if this post is all over the place, but given this is my first attempt at blogging and I'm a work from home mother of 2 berserker babes i'm just gonna let 'er rip!

I need to vent about my 7 month old son, heretofore known as Pikey.

So Pikey is a dreamboat. An absolute dreamboat. Nothing but smiles. The kind of kid that when you lean in for a kiss, he snuggles in to you. Awwwwww. This is what makes this next part so heart-breaking: Child be allergic to EVERYTHING!!

Now Pikey was a breastfed baby. Now after reading Tech Mommy's blog post about BF issues, I'm now convinced he had some issues back then, but I persisted. Afterall, breastfeeding is the single best thing you can do for your baby, right? At about 5 months old we started supplementing with 1 bottle of formula at night. Pikey be hungry!

He had rashes right from the beginning. Our pediatrician, who is the WORST, just said: "It's eczema. Very common. It will clear on it's own." (Remind me to do a separate post on the over-specialization of AB's medical system!)

After a few months of no change, my girlfriend showed me a picture of a baby with a with a cow's milk protein allergy. It looked just like my Pikey! Red scaly patches on his cheeks. After doing a bit of research, we switched him to Nutramigen, and saw an immediate change. Hurrah! Problem solved, right? I continued breasfeeding with a bit of Nutramigen to supplement and all was swell for about a week.

Enter solids. Rice cereal. This child's skin exploded. Red welts all over his body.
Must be the formula in the cereal right? Bought organic rice flour and mixed in Nutramigen. No different. We stopped the rice and went to sweet potato. No problem. Squash. OK. Beans. Alright. Chicken. Mild rash. We then stopped new foods. This rash persisted. I cut out rice from my diet then took him to the pediatrician. She said "No detergent, or body soap. Continue with the Nutramigen. It'll pass." and sent him for an allergy test.

As we waited for the results, we tried apples and pear. Slight rash, not enough to discontinue.

So a month later, and he's still on the same restricted diet. I stopped breastfeeding because it seemed he was having flare-ups from my wheat, rice and dairy consumption. We've added carrots to the list of known allergens. Who is allergic to carrots???? SERIOUSLY??? We tried a soy formula just to see if maybe anything had changed. Child turned purple. And had hives from head to toe.